Hey, Tetragame, 

It's happening! Heck yes, she's interacting with me!

So, like, Gxelo isn't quite considering this as being reality. And you're changing stats around, which are things that intervene directly on Gxelo's ability to evaluate which things are good decisions and why. And it just feels like more should be communicated here? It's the kind of thing where either you are or nobody-in-particular is doing the bits of optimisation, instead of Gxelo, and even if that goes well the process is something that our extrapolated volition would object to.

Okay, but, right, she's about to actually start the Tetragame, I don't particularly want to add more complicated steps now, the thread is actually starting, when she sees the changes caused by the ROT stat that'll actually break scepticism and therefore end your objection because ROT doesn't just increase magically in healthy adults. This seems to be win-win-win here! 

Tetragame, 

This is kind of a weird taboo you have here. Should I, like, throw up a warning screen or something? 

Sure, for example.

Fiiine.

⚠️  Alert ⚠️

The following stat change (+1 ROT) will cause mental changes to the degree implied by the change requested to be made.

The change itself is reversible; the effects of the change are not in general.

You are currently under the effects of Autoskepticism but for the purposes of trade-across-epipossible-worlds it is advised to treat this decision as real.

This is so sworn on the subjunctive dependence shared between all who say this and know what it means to say this.

Accept /q: [Yes] / [No] / [Coordinate (40 ROT needed)]

Ugh, now the vibe is off, the game looks like it's a scary and serious business thing, I bet Gxelo is going to bounce right off this into analysis paralysis. 

aaaaa

this is sure a scary and serious business thing. gxelo is going to bounce off this into analysis paralysis.

it sure makes it more agonising to go > [Accept] > [+] and, like, if this is real she wanted to do that and if it's not real it won't do anything so, like, whatever. maybe if she was higher ROT she'd go think more about the subjunctive dependence math and, like, it's reversible. sure. let's just actually go run the experiment.

aaaaa.

ROT 11.

she doesn't feel any different. 

:iguess:

okay shape rotation test 

ooaaughhh

okay, caffeine, and then shape rotation. probably at some point it would help to be actually sentient for this, and apparently that point is now because those shapes have suddenly decided to refuse to rotate in her head. 

gxelo finds a cup sitting around that doesn't seem too bad, gets some apple juice - 

oh huh, she doesn't actually have any apple juice. this is just like the last time she intended to get apple juice. someone should probably get some more apple juice, at some point. 

- gxelo gets some water, and fishes out a caffeine pod from the bucket which fortunately isn't empty. she drinks it at frightening speed.

ah, caffeine water. 

there's kind of some gunk at the bottom because you're actually meant to stir it and wow that sure sounds like adding extra steps to a task which definitionally happens when you're low on caffeine and this is fine actually because she's still thirsty. water, annihilate water, alright let's go. 

now it's time to rotate some shapes.

and first, textnet.

Got you. It doesn't happen by volition, per se; the Gxelo simply uses textnet, as a primitive action. Does she even realise she's doing it? Not enough for the Chief Executive of Function to receive the message across her cluttered desk and send it somewhere else.

Textnet is, strictly speaking, the name for the entire interconnected data transfer network that a vast number of terminals and devices are connected to, including most general-purpose personal terminals, though nowadays it's often metonym for the two-way posting-and-reading user-visible part of this. A subset of this half-hour's menu of thrilling topics that have bubbled to the top of the interoperable combination of boards and threads and markets and datastructures that Gxelo's textnet client of choice: 

• Is Razmir a skrunkly scrimblo who has done nothing wrong in his entire life, or is he evil and must be put down and can never redeem? It has been 0.4 years since the last update and the prediction markets have not moved since, but surely the next message will achieve consensus. The loudest voice on the Razmir-is-evil side is a Razmir fictive, that's kind of funny. 
• New update to that fic about the sad kid who causes explosions! 
• The continuation of some inscrutable thing about a complicated ontology of demongirls who represent archetypes. Gxelo fondly remembers being 19 and being one of these kids. It has festered greatly since.
• An even worse way to pack 17 squares into a larger square has been discovered.
• ...so the tone of these five different posts indicates that they're all part of the same meme, though Gxelo doesn't have enough examples to figure out what exactly the underlying generator is. 
• New update to that fic about the anthropics decision theory yuri! 
• Conversation with a Markov chain bot! The new meta is that if you say "burger" enough times then this pushes it into a state where you can get it to run off arbitrary past messages.
• New experimental textnet client! It is three times faster and also doesn't work. 
• Drawings of anime girls that match Gxelo's tags. These load in the background, they're heavier than text and don't show up instantly. 
• New update to that fic about the ... so this one's actually kind of high context. 
• So a fun fact about predictionmarkets is that you can actually execute arbitrary code on them. Will X NAND Y resolve YES? You know the rest.
• New update to that log of the gameplay of a high-fidelity grouphouse simulator! It's going slower than realtime which is making things very chaotic on backscroll.

Also, Gxelo has 13 unread messages! Are you going to look at any of those? 

the "subtract 13 from your unread messages" operation is so fluid at this point that gxelo doesn't even parse this as alerting her to having new messages. 

okay so first of all you have razmir's characterisation completely wrong, have you even been reading the same fic as me, that's not even stated that's just a common headcanon and also separately it's actually also wrong, what is this are you imagining some hypothetical razmir who was raised in tetratopia or something, you actually have to look at the conditional responses and not just the responses, it's called media literacy go grep it on the tropes zettel. okay you in particular are actually a hypothetical razmir raised in tetratopia you get away with this. the rest of you have no excuse go read arc 2 chapter 3 repeatedly until you stop having incorrect opinions. of course she's buying in the predictionmarkets. this does not move them because they have limit orders far bigger than what gxelo actually wants to spend on a textnet argument on either side. 

now this is a fun new chapter. well kind of a fun new chapter. she started reading this back when it came out and got up to the then-present in a single grand burst of hyperfocus and now it's kind of starting to drag a bit. probably it would feel faster if she was reading the complete work from the start and as it stands it's just occasionally seeing a sad person with newfound superpowers continue in the same patterns they were always in. hm the markets on plot events are looking optimistic something of some sort will happen soon though. sure she'll take it.

ah, kids. do something better with your lives. like, uh. never mind.

oh wow that is extremely ugly. there's, like, a massive gap in there. surely you could rotate this square here a little bit and then smush the other squares in to the new space and get something smaller /socratic. like, y'know, if you rotate that shape... rotate... that... shape.

oh yeah she was doing something wasn't she. 

she looks over to the floating blue interface. still there. still "ROT 11", one point above her "ROT 10". she's had time to wake up, textnet sure looks pretty coherent and she's probably had discussions that make sense, and the interface is still there.

...wow she really hopes she isn't in some liminal state and secretly she's having discussions that aren't making sense.

okay. shape rotation time. 

...okay. shape rotation time.

and first, textnet. 

you see, if she does this shape rotation test, then it could disprove this, in which case the superposition is broken and nothing ever changes like nothing has ever changed; or it proves this, in which case she has to keep doing this, and keep moving, and engage with it seriously and make difficult character optimisation choices which are also decisions in the real world. 

if she doesn't, then...

she can't really be performatively mad at metacognition, because she's getting outcomes better in expectation as measured against what she actually wants. so: apophasis.

alright. let's go.

let's. rotate. some expletive. shapes.

Gxelo gets about median, as she did previously. Nothing anomalous enough that it would seem that anything is going on, and Tetratopians aren't all that great at picking apart the subtle flavours of mental effects. Plus, she's kind of nervous, and kind of self-sabotaging, she was never going to get a great score under these conditions.

rotate. shapes.

About median. A little above, let's say. 

rotate. shapes. rotate. shapes.

About median, one a bit above, one a bit less below.

rotate. rotate. rotate.

shapes. shapes. shapes. 

(tetratopians will just do this sometimes.)